Recusant said:
Those gosh darned Americans! They make American movies, for a primarily American audience, and they have the audacity to cast Americans! And take them from the racial group that makes up two-thirds of the population! It's almost as though movie studios felt that exposing people to unfamiliar people and situations and alienate them, putting a commercial project that cost tens of millions of dollars at risk. How abominable of them. Marketing is marketing, folks.
In a broader sense, however, I think we might be making a big, big mistake here, especially when I read comments like this:
erttheking said:
Nope. A Canadian Heterosexual white male is just as safe and boring as an American one. ...In fact...
Yup, just as boring
Nothing wrong with the archetype inherently , but let's not pretend it isn't a massive safe zone that gets treated as default for arbitrary reasons.
Supposedly, white guys are responsible for war, pollution, slavery, economic inequality, social injustice, global instability, the "oppression" of every other racial and social group out there, and they
STILL qualify as "safe and boring"? What do they have to do to impress you people? More to the point, what is it you're egging them on to try to get them to DO!?
Overall it's the same crap every dominant empire has gotten magnified by information technology. All the people getting conquered and enslaved by the Egyptians, Persians, etc... probably had similar attitudes but didn't have the internet, and also didn't want to get the attention of people who would actually come over there and wreck their shit, unlike the white empires which mostly just sits around wringing it's hands.
One interesting social theory which holds a degree of weight is that what your actually seeing is widespread racism against whites due to the belief that we're inferior. See, through most of history whites were a group of barbarians that were pretty much the bitches of the entire world. Darker skinned peoples ran around and enslaved us, forced us to work, and killed us for lulz. Even the romans and greeks weren't really white, they were much darker skinned, however with the fall of Rome they were nearly extinguished and the survivors largely bred into the white skinned barbarians who dominated the area after their loss and build an empire from the ashes of theirs. Historically speaking it's a series of freak occurances that lead to the world we now know, and the general domination of white nations as opposed to various "people of color" running the world as they had for the majority of human history.
To be honest given the realities of how the world turned out whites have every reason to have a serious hate on for everyone else, and indeed we engaged in our fair share of conquering and slavery, but it's also interesting to note we more or less stopped doing this on our own, developing strong codes of morality and ethics that demonized such things. Whites only held slaves on any signifigant level for a few hundred years compared to the thousands we were preyed upon. There have been some theories dealing with genetic memories, memes, etc... saying that one of the reasons why whites decided these things were wrong is due to having been victims for so much of our existence. This is also why we tend to be relatively reluctant to victimize others. While we've had some incredibly bloody wars due to the advancement of technology the reign of "white empires" has actually been pretty peaceful and has seen unprecedented developments in science, technology, and society, eclipsing the achievements of even the greatest old empires in a fraction of the time, in part due to being far more open and growing from some of the ideals Rome had but was never able to achieve on it's own.
Globally speaking right now slavery, oppression of women, etc... are all issues through most of the world. They might call it other things, but if you look at Africa (including The Middle East) where there were many great empires that sprung up around the fertile crescent those things have always been there and never left. Both India and China both of whom represent about 1/3rd of humanity each have horrendous human rights records and despite pretensions to the contrary rampant sexual discrimination and institutions of slavery and servitude. The wife of the Indian ambassador was involved in a pretty big incident not too long ago when her relationship with her servant was revealed for example. The exception to this of course is mostly "white" countries, namely the British Empire and it's descendants (the US, Canada, Australia... yes Canada was British indeed the mounties had their classic uniforms due to a tradition of being the last remnant of The British Colonial Army... I learned some interesting things about them when I was in Canada). We're the ones with a big bug up our butts about acceptance, doing away with slavery, etc... when places like China are concerned with remaining as mono-ethnic and tightly controlled as possible for example.
The point I'm getting at here is that I've heard theories, again going back to memes, genetic memory, and things like that which imply a lot of the crap we deal with today is a form of butthurt over role reversal. Even if they can't put a finger on it, your dark skinned person feels unusually affronted for having been enslaved, even if it was for a brief period, by a group of people he instinctively feels should be his slave because until fairly recently it has been that way, whites were the prey and the slaves. Not to mention the fact that whites have also done more in a shorter period of time than pretty much anyone else. While whites argue about who did what, there is some resentment looking at everything from phones, to electricity, to airplanes that almost everything we have now came from some white dude. There are exceptions of course but that can burn for reasons people might not fully understand. Argueing who gets to claim Bell, or the merits of Edison Vs. Tesla is all a bunch of pasty white folks discussing which pasty white guy was the smartest of the smart guys.
How true any of that is, I have no idea, and I don't fully embrace it mind you, I just find a lot of it interesting as there is a lot of truth to parts of it. I mean face it, when some black people claim they were building empires when whites were still running around hiding in caves, they are pretty much telling the truth. Understand that and looking at who the dominant empires belong to, what they accomplished, and perhaps worst of all the fact that we're tolerant rather than oppressors, especially when you compare us to nations and regions of color, that sort of has to burn, and might very well contribute to why we get blamed for everything.
It should also be noted that as I've said before, whites are actually a pretty tiny minority globally speaking, and as a general rule we don't control much of anything exclusively due to how tolerant we are. I can't think of any militantly mono-ethnic white countries off the top of my head, almost all of them have reasonably large "minority" populations. None that go as far as say China and/or Japan do with their notions of national purity. I suppose that contributes as well since when people want to get racial we literally have everyone right there to scream in our ear, and we go out of the way to give them a platform. Unlike say Japan or China where minorities are VERY small proportionatly and have little or no say at all. Nobody in say Japan holds out a mass media soap box and actually invites them to be critical of the ethnic Japanese right there in their own country, at least not on a large scale. In the US at least we actually encourage it and are so tolerant despite criticisms that nobody fears any repercussions. It's not like some other places where if the opportunity was taken, the guy who said something would probably be dead in an alley within 48 hours even if some of the people offering the chance itself were themselves sincere.
